Back issues of JEECS’s magazine The Cable are still available at bargain prices. Over the years The Cable has provided a unique account of the people, culture, places and events that made the Jewish East End so vibrant.

Michael Greisman, whose wonderful historic photograph compilations have featured in our magazine The Cable and on our website, has done it again with a collection of portraits of Jewish Servicemen and Servicewomen – many from the East End – who served with the British armed services during World War Two.

Many of you are probably puzzled that you have not heard from us for some time and that the latest issue of our magazine The Cable is the first in nearly a year. I am afraid that the committee has decided that, because of illnesses and other reasons, it has decided to wind up JEECS at the end of 2018.The latest issue of The Cable will be the last although emails will continue to be sent until the end of 2018. In short the committee feels that it just cannot continue running JEECS.

A gloriously evocative, and often very funny, collection of stories centred on an iconic East End street

Hessel Street. What an image the name conjures up, with its shops, its market, its cast of characters – the heart of the old Jewish East End. My mother recounted how, as a girl, one of her regular tasks was to take one of the chickens my grandfather kept in the backyard to a shochet in Hessel Street for slaughter and return home with the corpse.

Truly a vanished world.

It is a world a collection of short stories by Eric Levene conjures gloriously back to life. Feinstein’s Theory of Relatives and other Hessel Street stories, with its wonderfully apt title, introduces us to an array of memorable characters, many of whom recur throughout the book.

We are in the late 1940s and 1950s. Take it From Here and Ray’s a Laugh are on the radio. And in Hessel Street, Yoseler the Philosopher is dispensing advice, inspired by his muses Moshe die Mensch von Munchen and Shlomo Schon von Bonn.

Doris Feldman and Hannah Woolf, doyennes of the yachnahs, are spreading gossip while enjoining their eager listeners not to repeat a word of it. Abe and Sid are ensconced in the Joe Lyons in Whitechapel Road, never quite sure whether that is nearer their Hessel Street homes than the Lyons at Aldgate. Joe Gorminsky is watching the world from his butchers shop and leading the street’s traders. Mendel the newsagent contemplates leaving his wife, only people would talk. But they talked anyway, so he might as well have moved out.

And all around, people are oigavulting and oivayzmeering. Yiddish words and phrases are in common use, but not so much as to put off any readers who are Yiddish-impaired. Eric Levene

Eric Levene’s introduction alone is a laugh out loud essay. His stories range from the humorous – and they are very humorous – to the slightly sinister, to the whimsical, as in the trial of a shochet by three chickens intent on avenging their slaughtered sisters, to the tribulations of everyday life, as in the contortions a set of parents goes through in compiling a list of wedding guests.

I ended up feeling I knew these people of old. I was almost tempted to believe that two Jewish cooks had reached the summit of Everest ahead of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. And I had no doubt at all about the well-known slogan “Borscht is best”. There are fights, there are dreams, there are not so happy marriages, there is all human life, intermixed with the author’s wry observations on what his characters are up to or what they are saying.

This is a highly entertaining and evocative collection. I loved it. Eric Levene lived in Hessel Street in the 1940s and 50s. His grandfather – zayda – was a butcher and poulterer there. His memories of life at that time clearly remain strong. If I had one bone to pick it would be that I spell beigel beigel, not baigel. But, hey, I’m not going to start a broigus about that. As long as neither of us goes for bagel.

Feinstein’s Theory of Relatives and other Hessel Street stories. By Eric Levene.ISBN 9781973230892. Paperback £8.99. Available from Amazon, including for Kindle. Click here for details.

It will soon be time for one of the East End’s most spectacular events, the Great Yiddish parade, and you are all invited.

The date is Sunday November 19, when East End streets will echo with the sound of songs once sung there and forgotten for more than a century, as a marching band with singers and klezmer musicians bring Yiddish Victorian songs of protest back to the London of today.

Keep in touch

Latest news

The beautiful East London Centre Synagogue in Nelson Street (30-40 Nelson Street, E1 2DS) now features on Wikipedia, with an entry that draws in part from an article in JEECS magazine, The Cable.
Read More

Back issues of JEECS’s magazine The Cable are still available at bargain prices. Over the years The Cable has provided a unique account of the people, culture, places and events that made the Jewish East End so vibrant.
Read More

Michael Greisman, whose wonderful historic photograph compilations have featured in our magazine The Cable and on our website, has done it again with a collection of portraits of Jewish Servicemen and Servicewomen – many from the East End – who served with the British armed services during World War Two.
Read More

JEWISH EAST END CELEBRATION SOCIETY Newsletter 11 February 2018. From Clive Bettington, JEECS chairman As I said in the last Cable I plan to keep in contact with members of JEECS by newsletters at least until the end of this year. I want to thank everyone who sent emails regretting the closure of JEECS: David and I were touched to…Read More